Not all talk: Club meets to keep Yiddish alive

They tell stories and jokes in Yiddish as though it were still a living language, which to them, it still is.

Yiddish, or "Jewish," the language of Eastern European Jews until the middle of the 20th century, is still spoken at the Yiddish Conversation Group, which meets for an hour and a half each Friday at Temple Anshei Shalom. It is the highlight of the week for 20 to 30 retirees, who relish the camaraderie and memories of their mostly Eastern European and New York City youth.

"I still say prayers and talk to God in Yiddish," said Dorothy Rubin, 74, who was born in the Bronx to parents from Poland and Austria. "It's so rare to get a chance to speak it. It's an opportunity to reconnect with your past."

The conversation group, one of a diminishing number of Yiddish clubs in Palm Beach County, was organized 16 years ago by Frieda Schulman and Mary Edelson, sisters who sought to encourage seniors to teach Yiddish to their grandchildren in hopes of saving the vibrant mama loschen, or mother tongue.

"We want to perpetuate the language and the culture," said Schulman, 82, who was born in Poland but grew up in the Bronx. "The people who come to us every week, many who haven't spoken Yiddish in years, they improve tremendously."

Yiddish, which uses the Hebrew alphabet, became a language around the year 1000, when Jews began to use Hebrew letters to write in the languages of the European countries they lived in, especially German. The language thrived. Writers developed brilliant works of literature, theater and music. Among the most famous writers were Sholom Aleichem, whose works were developed into the play Fiddler on the Roof, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in 1978.

When Jews immigrated to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they brought Yiddish, and the language permeated the streets of New York City. Many Yiddish words are so vivid they made a permanent mark on English, including schmooze, chutzpah, tchatchke and meshuge, or crazy. Expressions with Yiddish intonations also took hold ("With friends like that, who needs enemies?").

Despite the love many Jews have for it today, many new Americans rejected Yiddish and encouraged their children to speak only English. Combined with the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, Yiddish began to claim fewer and fewer speakers, declining from 11 million before World War II to about 600,000 today, according to the Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University.

Still, there has been a revival of interest over the past 10 years, said Frederick Greenspahn, director of Jewish studies at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Klezmer music has grown in popularity, while universities report an increasing number of Yiddish classes, he said.

The resurgence is ironic, Greenspahn said, because many American Jews became embarrassed to speak Yiddish outside their communities because it was associated with an old, less-sophisticated world.

"There's a romanticism of what life was like on the Lower East Side and in Eastern Europe," Greenspahn said. "In reality, people were clamoring to get out."

Hymie Kopel, of Boca Raton, spoke Yiddish in Johannesburg, South Africa, where his family emigrated from Lithuania in 1931. He immigrated to the United States in 1984 but said he can connect to Jews throughout the world through Yiddish.

"It is a dying language," said Kopel, 81. "But I feel happy I can speak it with people, whoever they may be."

Lois Solomon can be reached at lsolomon@sun-sentinel. com or 561-243-6536.